How Technology Affects Children

It is believed that no one under as far back as the year 2000 can be referred to as a child, except of course, being a child of his or her parents. With this premise, we can say all kids are 21st century born.

Technology dates far back into centuries, but for the purpose of this article, we can say technology was already ruling the scene before any child was born. Therefore, all kids were born into technology.

That been said, we must also establish that there is almost no area that technology does not have a contribution to in the whole wide world. However, this article seeks to examine exactly how technology affects children.

A few decades back, the things that constituted a child’s social life were running out with peers in the open, building forts, riding bikes, and the likes. These days, you would hardly find such sights. Even parents rely on gadgets and other technology to make their lives easier and faster, including raising kids.

In 2010, a research was done by a Kaiser Foundation, the results show that kids of this age spend an average of 7 hours and 30 minutes on entertainment technology. This can be proven valid because more than 50 percent of the world have their Television sets on all through the day.

However, the effects of technology on children could be quite complicated, but here are a few facts as to how technology has affected children and their performance. Technology has its own effects and costs; and sometimes determining whether its effect are good or bad could depend on what kind of technology the child is exposed to and how much exposure is allowed.

Video games and some other screen media help a child to improve his or her ability to focus, response to stimuli, visual-spatial abilities and the ability to identify specific elements individually in a cluster of other elements. It helps kids to think not just in words, but also in pictures.

Reading text has also been tested to be more effective than reading online materials that could be interrupted by ads and other cyber interruptions. Research says teaching a class with text proved effective because the kids remembered what was taught, whereas kids taught with the internet didn’t know as much or pass as well as the kids restricted to text.

It has also being established that knowing a lot of things does not make a kid smart. A kid could however be considered smart if he or she knows where to find things and always finds his way out of complex situations. We are hereby challenged to think differently of the effect of the internet on the children’s brain capability. The fact that it doesn’t do what we expect it to do doesn’t make it out rightly bad. This could mean the kids brains are allowed to think in a new